The “Be Counted, Represent” campaign offers music downloads and a chance at concert tickets to cell phone users who share their e-mail addresses and phone numbers with organizers and forward information about the census to their friends.

Principal organizers Voto Latino and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund stress in their messages that undercounted areas risk losing funding for transit, infrastructure and other needs, as well as political representation.

They hope those messages promoting participation in the count will zip throughout the social networks of youngsters who can persuade their parents to fill out and return their census forms.

“You’re looked at by many, many, many people as being powerful when it comes to money that they can line their pockets with,” actress Rosario Dawson, a Voto Latino co-founder, told teenagers gathered in the library of a predominantly Latino high school. “When it’s money that can line your pockets, no one ever says anything. But we’re saying something.”

The campaign offers a package of 25 music downloads curated for a young Hispanic audience to cell phone users who share their zip codes, e-mail addresses and cell phone numbers with the program’s organizers. The downloads include songs by such artists as Pitbull, Mos Def and Morrissey.

Users can get also get songs by taking census quizzes on a smart phone application that they download.

If they invite their friends to download the application, they’re entered into a raffle for tickets to a “secret concert” to be held in the Los Angeles area in April.

Anyone can participate, although the campaign is aimed at teens and 20-somethings.

Organizers said such measures are a way to get through to an ethnic group that has been hard for census officials to reach because of indifference, language barriers and — for some — deportation fears.

Alejandro Fernandez, an 18-year-old high school senior who attended the announcement, said he planned to download the census application on his Web-enabled phone and would share it with friends who will spread the word to their parents.

“They’ll be exposed to what the census is really about and not be scared,” he said.

Copyright © 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

The contest is being run by Obama’s political arm – Organizing for America – which is housed at DNC headquarters in Washington, DC. It is the latest effort by the president’s political team to try and enlist the grassroots to help pressure Congress to pass health care reform this year.

“We know that compelling videos can touch people in a way that words alone simply cannot,” Natalie Foster, OFA’s new media director, said in an e-mail announcing the contest last week. “The messages that regular people put together will make a bigger difference than any false smears or slick ads the other side can dream up. And who knows — your creative, powerful, or touching video could help tip the balance in favor of health reform.”

OFA will officially announce the names of the judges late Wednesday morning. The contest ends October 18

She didn’t elaborate on how the administration was “friendly,” but we presume she meant his work that supports the speech she gave about preventing sexual violence against women. She received a standing ovation.

Wearing a sleek, copper Bottega Veneta dress, Dawson appeared on behalf of the originally scheduled speaker, Eve Ensler — playwright of the “Vagina Monologues” and friend of Dawson (Dawson read for Ensler’s play last month in Santa Monica, Calif.).

Source: Washington Examiner

The actress, whose movie credits include Sin City, has recorded vocals on one of the song ‘West Riding Silver Bullet’. In an interview with BBC 6Music, frontman Tom Meighan said fans could expect a “raw” sound from their third studio effort. “It’s gonna freak people out but it’s so good, the record, compared to the other two and I love the other two,” he said. “They’re like my two babies but this record is something else.”

The album has been produced by guitarist Serge Pizzorno and Gorillaz collaborator Dan The Automator. Meighan said the producer helped the band to “put a new spin” on the album. Bassist Chris Edwards added: “He is hip hop, he’s got all the beats down and he is just a great producer and he brought a different flavour to what we were doing.

“We are predominantly a rock ‘n’ roll band but we do dance tracks and different bits and bobs like that, so he just seemed like the perfect guy to get in.” Kasabian previewed songs from their forthcoming album at London’s Royal Albert Hall on Friday (March 27th). Fans can download their new single, ‘Vlad The Impaler’, for free from the group’s official website starting tomorrow.

‘The West Rider Pauper Lunatic Asylum’ is released on June 8th.

 Source: Gigwise

Rosario Dawson is in some elite company. The “Seven Pounds” actress has met President-elect Barack Obama not once, but several times. “I met him a few years ago in his office when he was still Senator Obama,” she said Sunday night, as she began her walk down the red carpet at the Latino Inaugural Gala at Union Station. Co-sponsored by Voto Latino, the youth empowerment organization she co-founded, the gala — which featured a night-closing set from Marc Anthony, who was introduced by wife Jennifer Lopez — capped a day in which Dawson said she was awed once again by the incoming president’s ability to move Americans of all stripes.

“It was really great seeing him today at the Lincoln Memorial [during the "We Are One" concert," she said. "It was just remarkable to be there with him and all those other people and feel like there was just no line between anybody. Everybody was so excited to be there." Dawson was equally pumped up about her upcoming gig as one of the guest correspondents at Tuesday night's official Youth Ball, which will be a part of MTV's "Be the Change: Live From the Inaugural" special.

"I'm really excited," she said. "When we were in the wings [at the concert], I was standing with Forest Whitaker and Usher, and we hadn’t all stood together since I was 19, 10 years ago, doing ‘Light It Up.’ And suddenly we found ourselves going, ‘Oh my God, look at where we are.’ ” Dawson said she’s looking forward to telling the Youth Ball audience about what Voto Latino has been up to and how much more work there still is left to be done.

“We’re still very much trying to get people registered,” she said. “Because, even though I know y’all just voted, there’s still so much to do. There are 50,000 Latinos turning 18 every month, so we need to get them registered and ready to go, so we don’t need to scramble at the next election.”

At the ball, Dawson said she’ll also be interviewing attendees about their experiences voting and quizzing first-time voters about what they did to get out the vote. “People were really participatory, and people were volunteering and being really active, and I’m curious to hear their stories as well.”

As proud as Dawson said she is of the way Latino voters mobilized in 2008, she admitted that she would not be along the parade route or in the stands on Inauguration Day. “I think I’m going to be in a warmer place than just standing outside,” she said, perhaps still trying to warm her bones after the bone-chilling temperatures during “We Are One.” “It was a little rough today. I think I’m gonna celebrate that with my staff, and then we’re going to go out, and I’ll see you at the Youth Ball.”

“Be the Change: Live From the Inaugural” will air live on MTV on Tuesday, January 20, at 10 p.m. ET/PT. MTV News will have wall-to-wall coverage of the event and of the scenes in Washington, D.C., New Orleans and Kenya in the days leading up to the event and in the days that follow.

Okay, I think the big question our Forum posters have had – can you answer without giving away spoilers – who is Anna talking to?

Who is Anna talking to? She’s talking to… let’s just say that person is the star/focal point of Season 2. That vague enough?

Having someone as charismatic and attractive as Rosario Dawson to star was a huge coup – was it something that you really had to fight for, or was Rosario a bit of a cyber-pioneer?

Rosario did a voice in AW – Delondre. She had such a good time doing it, and really enjoyed the show, that she approached us about doing a webseries together. So we developed G-D specifically for her, and with her – she was also a producer. Yea, everything in the show was meant to be “5 mins in the future.” My fave thing was the Agri-Defense company with killer Beetants. Yikes! Also liked the “Smart Cows” shepherded by an automated farm. A lotta that cool stuff came from Andy Black, one of our writers and former researcher on the show “Numbers.”

How hard is it to concentrate on work when the Rosario Dawson is sitting across from you? Or is it easy to see a superstar as a normal person once you get to know them?

It was never easy. Especially in some of those outfits!

To read the entire interview click here.

I hadn’t seen so much of her [movies] as I expected, but I wanted to give her a chance, so I asked her to come and audition. She came in and she wasn’t the only one. We had three or four incredible actresses come in a read with Will and she just had the best chemistry. That match revealed to be the best since the very first moment. I think she and Will push the movie in such a tender vibe and recall us of our experiences with love. [Look at] their eyes, the way that they caress each other, the way that they look at each other. All those elements are intangible, but they are on the screen because of their chemistry. I know we worked pretty hard to achieve the result, but there are things that no director can really pull out of actors. That’s natural talent.

Source: Vibe

Directed by newcomer Brian Horiuchi, “Billion” tells the story of three couples (including Pattinson and Thirlby) dealing with the same reality-shaking event that threatens to tear them apart. “I don’t have a relationship to him in the film,” Dawson said of Robert Pattinson. “So we never meet. But we’re all within the same group of people, and the same city of people, that are responding to a life-threatening situation.”

The “Sin City” and “Clerks II” star (who will next be seen in the Will Smith drama “Seven Pounds”), also revealed to us that she’s been keeping a close eye on the “Twilight” phenomenon – and her future co-star – as both have spent the last few weeks running amok on the world of pop culture. “I haven’t met him yet, but I’m really looking forward to it,” she explained, adding another reason why she’s a newly-minted “Twilight” fan herself: “Catherine Hardwicke is someone I really adore, and have been casual friends with over the years.”

Source: MTV

In an L.A. hotel room, she says that she knew the film—which stars Will Smith as a Good Samaritan offering help to several people in dire need—had attracted interest from a number of Hollywood’s leading ladies. “I remember I broke down and cried when I was with my mom, and I told her that I had been asked to audition. I said, ‘I am so scared, because this is the most important thing ever.’ You always hope as an actress that you will get this kind of script across your desk, and sometimes I have gotten a great script and then been told that there is an offer out to someone else. I knew that if I didn’t get this part, it was because of me, that there were a lot of other women vying for this role and that this was really big. I needed to know that I could be a good enough actor to make this woman come to life, because she has an incredible story that needed to be told and needed to be told well.”

As soon as she was signed to the role, Dawson did whatever it took to get it right, including extensive research on heart transplants. She says she began to realize she was doing something completely different: rather than just playing a role, she was taking on her own fears of death and dying.

“I did a lot of research. I spent time with someone who had had a heart transplant. I studied about surgeries and I talked to a trauma doctor, and all of it brought out a lot of information about how many surgeries Emily would have had. She would have gone through four or five pacemakers because you don’t go into the level of being on a [transplant] waiting list without that, so talking to him [the heart-transplant recipient] was incredible. I learned that he couldn’t run or even walk more than three paces without being out of breath, and I filtered it through Emily, knowing they were part of her life. But it is difficult, because you start thinking about your own mortality, and that’s a lot different than battling aliens.”

Source: Straight.com

Source: Premier Magazine